I am sure that you will have noticed that many organisations now turning to video to enhance their news, updates, helpful tips and other information. COVID-19 made 'Zoom' and 'Teams' names that every business person has recently become aware of, practically overnight. As many of us are working remotely and not able to engage in person it's easy to see that video can fill an important gap.
Video is now becoming more important as a marketing tool and is likely be for the foreseeable future, but how do you add a video to your Email Marketing Campaigns? There are some important factors to consider as it is vital that you get this right, there is nothing worse than clicking a play button only to discover that it doesn’t work, or worse still, just offers an empty box on the page where your video should be.
Bear in mind that most commonly used email clients including, Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo, do not support video within the body of an email. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a video within your campaign, it just means that you have to approach it from a different angle to get a video in front of your reader.
The easiest way to insert a video into your email campaign is to simply create an engaging still from the video and link this to the operational video hosted online. This could be on YouTube, Vimeo or another public video hosting platform. However, a better option would to be to link this to a page on your website where the video is embedded and set to play automatically. This means that when the user clicks on the video not only does it start playing for them automatically, but they are also now on your website where (hopefully) you have other content for them to consume and engage with.
As an alternative to using a still image another technique is to use an animated gif. This is more complex than just using a static image, but the addition of movement into the body of your email can really attract attention
If you have your own design team they should be able to create the necessary gif’s for you. If that's not the case then you can speak to our design team for this service. In addition there are online tools which can automatically generate gif’s from image sets that you upload. Once you have an animated gif you use it within your campaigns in the same way as a static image.
Make sure you pick the perfect spot within your campaign to place your image or animated gif. If you put it right at the bottom of your campaign and make people scroll (yawn) to get to it they are likely not to see it and therefore not click to watch your video. Ideally you want a short piece of text at the top of your email and then your ‘video’ underneath.
Whichever route you take, either inserting an animated gif or a static image, make sure you include a play button on the gif/image to tell the viewer that it is a video and thus encourage them to click through to your content.
If you want to produce a video but not sure about the content then get some inspiration from our blog post: What content should I write for my email campaigns?
If you are struggling to get a video in your campaign or if you would like us to review your campaign before you send it, just drop us a line, we are a friendly bunch and always happy to help! 01603 858250 / communicate@smartmessenger.co.uk
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